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Memory, modernity and history: the landscapes of Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka, 1948-1998.
Robin Jones
KeywordsGeoffrey Bawa, Lunuganga, landscape, memory, modernity, history
Abstract
This paper discusses selected Sri Lankan landscapes designed by the architect
Geoffrey Bawa between 1948 and 1998, in particular Lunuganga, a landscape
garden created by Bawa for himself in the South West coastal region of the
island. It assesses these spaces as sites of memory and locations where
modernity and history are negotiated.
Bawa’s architectural and landscape designs have been amply documented. Prior
scholarship has, for the most part, narrated his life’s work. However, less
attention has been paid to contextualizing Bawa’s output in a longer continuum.
In addition, this article theorizes Lunuganga in relation to the production of
modernity in Sri Lanka after independence and negotiation of the island’s
relationship to colonial and pre-colonial histories, using this landscape as a case
study.
1
The island of Sri Lanka has a long history of the development of cultural
landscapes. The place of water in these landscapes has also been a significant
feature. Bawa’s landscapes can be located within these traditions. Furthermore,
the time he spent in Europe furnished him with an understanding of the
picturesque landscape tradition. However, Lunuganga could be described as a
site where these (colonial) histories and vernacular traditions re-staged or re-
presented the modern in contemporary Sri Lanka.
Conditions of the pre-colonial, colonial, and modern in South Asia are discussed
here but Bawa’s landscapes can also be ‘read’ as ‘sites of memory’, where,
although of the modern era, the past is recalled. In the making of Lunuganga,
Bawa negotiated his relationship to the past through constructions derived from
colonialism. The landscape of Lunuganga references these negotiations between
slavish adoption of a universal modern, with its taint of colonial subjugation, the
wilful neglect of this troubled past and the pursuit of an uncomplex indigenism
and, in so doing, intervenes in the production of modernity in Sri Lanka.
2
IntroductionThis article will discuss selected landscapes designed by the architect Geoffrey
Bawa in Sri Lanka between 1948 and 1998. It assesses these spaces as sites of
memory and locations where modernity and history were negotiated. The main
subject of this paper is, however, Lunuganga (salt river), a landscape garden
created after 1948 by Bawa for himself near Bentota, in the South West coastal
region of Sri Lanka. This garden has been described in previous architectural
publications but will be interpreted here as a process of meaning, constructed
and projected or re-staged.
Professor David Robson, the architect’s most recent biographer, has described
Lunuganga as ‘a civilized wilderness, not a garden of flowers and fountains; it is
a composition in monochrome, green on green… a landscape of memories and
ideas’ (2002, 239). This last, open-ended phrase will be used as a starting point
to examine issues around the place of memory, modernity and history in relation
to the creation of this particular South Asian landscape, commenced at the
moment of Independence and developed during the first decades of de-
colonization in Sri Lanka. Although created as a private domain and possessing
a whimsical, poetic quality, the meanings implicit in the landscape of Lunuganga,
it will be suggested, address wider cultural concerns. These include the coming
into being of a newly-independent nation, that nation’s relationship with its own
3
distant, pre-colonial history as well as the immediate colonial past and post-
colonial present.
Previous literature
Bawa’s buildings, his biography, his place in the pantheon of modern Asian
architects, as well as his contribution to the design of landscape have been
amply documented (Brawne 1978; Taylor 1986 and 1995; Robson 2002 and
2007). Prior scholarship specifically devoted to Bawa’s architecture presents
detailed and carefully researched chronologies of his output. One of the earliest
key texts on Bawa was written by the architectural historian, Brian Brace Taylor
(1986 and 1995). In his introductory chapter, ‘A House is a Garden’, Taylor
located Bawa within the cultural historical break-up of the modern movement in
the late 1950s and early 1960s but also made reference to Bawa’s drawing on
the vernacular architectural and landscape traditions of the island of Ceylon/Sri
Lanka. David Robson’s comprehensive, meticulously researched and evocative
writings on Bawa’s achievements return to themes introduced by Taylor but he
adopts a more biographical approach, having known Bawa and gained access to
the architect’s archive. However, prior scholarship in relation to the architect’s
output is still at an early and uncritical stage of development that might best be
described as ‘mapping the field’; Bawa died as recently as 2003. The main focus
of these works has been to capture the range and extent of Bawa’s architectural
achievement and to position him at the forefront of architectural developments in
South Asia during the first decades of de-colonization. This slightly celebratory
tone is apparent, for example, in a recent text where Bawa is eulogized as an
4
‘Asian guru’ (Robson 2002, 261). A significant part of the previous literature has
been informed by the methods of architectural history which have directed
research and writing along well-trodden paths.
However, discussion of Bawa’s architecture and landscapes must also be
situated in relation to recent critical literature on Sri Lanka’s so-called ‘tropical
modern’ architecture. This literature includes the work of Nihal Perera and the
assessment of a ‘critical vernacularism’ in the post-independence period on the
island, as well as texts by Anoma Pieris and others that address the place of the
modern in contemporary Sri Lanka (Perera 1999 and 2010; Pieris 2007).1
The present article also engages with recent critical writing that has
problematized the concept of modernity and the post-colonial condition in South
Asia, especially contributions by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Timothy Mitchell and
Rebecca Brown (Chakrabarty 2000 and 2002; Mitchell 2000; Brown 2009). In
particular these writers variously challenge the notion of a plurality of modernities
or alternative modernities that derive from a singular, unified (and Western)
modernity. They also argue for the modern as an innately unstable condition and
for the central role that colonialism played in the production of modernity. Due to
this instability, Mitchell and others suggest that modernity ‘must be continually re-
staged to preserve an internally unified…presence’ (Mitchell 2000, 23; Brown
2009, 10).
5
Following this line of reasoning, rather than reifying an un-problematically given
sense of Sri Lanka’s pre-colonial and colonial histories, it can be argued instead
that these previous histories simply cannot be erased or circumscribed.
Therefore, post-independence Sri Lanka continually negotiates its relationship to
the past through constructions originating in colonialism. It then follows that
Bawa’s architecture and landscapes cannot just be understood as an alternative
modernity that references a central, singular, monolithic modern located in
Europe. Neither is Bawa’s work specifically marked by an over-arching difference
or South Asian-ness. Rather, his output can be interpreted as an intervention in
or interruption of a totalizing, unified modern through the re-presentation or re-
staging of that modern.
Adopting a trans-disciplinary framework that deploys critical approaches to the
study of landscape and memory, post-colonial literature and design history, the
present article contextualizes Bawa’s output by situating it in a longer, South
Asian continuum. It also theorizes his works by discussing them in relation to the
centrality of colonialism in the production of South Asian modernity, using Bawa’s
landscape at Lunuganga as a case study. In addition, it suggests that the
architect’s landscapes (and buildings) participate in and form constitutive
elements of the staging of the modern in post-independence Sri Lanka.
6
The Landscape of Lunuganga
The creation of the garden at Lunuganga has been well documented elsewhere
(Taylor 1986; Bawa, Bon and Sansoni 1990; Robson 2003, 2007). The initial
purchase consisted of a ten-hectare strip of land (near Bentota) straddling ‘two
low hills on a promontory jutting out the Dedduwa Lake, a brackish lagoon fed by
an estuary of the Bentota River’, with a ramshackle bungalow at its centre
(Robson 2002, 238). Picturesque, modern and vernacular landscape models are
evident in the site at Lunuganga. Bawa re-directed the entrance road to the
property, guiding the visitor, in the manner of picturesque gardens in England
such as Stowe, to approach the main building from an unexpected direction in
order to obtain a pre-arranged view (Robson 2002, 238). At the entrance, there is
a surprise view in the direction of Cinnamon Hill and the dagoba of a temple
located at a distance from the property. During the 1950s, Bawa re-aligned the
bungalow, began to level the northern terrace and clear vistas to the lake. The
bungalow became ‘the hub of the composition’, as David Robson suggests, in
much the same way as picturesque gardens in England were ordered, the point
at which the totality of the landscape makes sense to the viewer. Lunuganga is
situated in the island’s wet zone and vegetation is therefore luxuriantly tropical,
bearing no comparison to the ‘well-behaved’ flora of English gardens. The
clearances of the land and the construction of buildings effected on the site had,
of necessity, to take local climatic conditions into account, as vernacular
buildings had done and continue to do. During the 1960s and 1970s, Bawa was
busy with architectural projects around Bentota and situated his office at
7
Lunuganga. He began to build structures in the landscape, including a covered
bridge over the ha-ha (a standard feature of the picturesque), a small house for
office staff and tiny square pavilion on the eastern terrace (known as ‘the Hen
House’). As David Robson has suggested, at Lunuganga Bawa ‘set buildings into
their site to create enclosed and semi-enclosed outdoor spaces’ (2002, 238).
This acknowledgement of local topography and local use of space references
pre-colonial, vernacular traditions. The so-called ‘Hen House’ located on the
eastern terrace, composed of an over-hanging, square hipped and tiled roof,
raised on four brick piers, with three sides enclosed by wooden lattice-work
panels, originates in vernacular examples (such as rest houses or ambalama);
these examples are not simply copied but re-worked by Bawa to present a
structure that is also modern.2 In 1983, a garden room was built and an ochre
coloured Gothic Court on one of the axes of the garden was constructed. To the
north of the bungalow, a lawn leads to an undulating wall with picturesque views
north and west. Statues and walls and paving have been added over the years to
articulate the space and evoke related spaces in Italian and English gardens.
The North Terrace is also articulated by a modernist geometric grid of stonework.
After a debilitating stroke in 1998, major works on the garden ceased.
As with many landscapes, Bawa’s garden in South Western Sri Lanka may
usefully be described as a palimpsest, a place where the original ‘inscriptions’ of
previous owners, in terms of the organisation of space and traces left on the 1 For further discussions about the place of the modern in contemporary Sri Lanka see also the work of Pradeep Jeganathan (1995), Catherine Braun and Tariq Jazeel (2007 and 2009).2 For a vernacular examples of such ambalamas at Kurunegala and Karagahagedera see Lewcock, Sansoni and Senanayake (1998, 72-3).
8
land, have been effaced to make room for new ones. Bawa altered the purpose
of the place from the production of commodities to the production of an imaginary
space or personal cartography (Bastea 2004) where memory traces were re-
worked and re-presented. In fact, as David Robson notes, the landscape of
Lunuganga was a ‘man-made creation, which in its previous incarnations had
been a Dutch cinnamon garden and a British rubber estate’ (2007, 238). We
must also remember that the landscape possessed a prior, local history before
European contact with Ceylon in the sixteenth century. Vernacular land-usage
and colonial ‘structuring’ of the land and its integration into the global economic
order shaped the topography of Lunuganga. Bawa mapped onto this previously
inscribed landscape an imaginary framework that accommodated the previous
history of the land, as well as his own cultural background, straddling both East
and West, in addition to the idioms of international modernism. The rise and fall
of the land, the tree-lined shore of the lagoon, the distant view of the Buddhist
dagoba, the modernized, colonial-period bungalow, various architectural ‘eye-
catchers’ and a number of ancient trees have been staged to present a
landscape of the imagination where a range of different references are made.
Lunuganga is not so much a picturesque image as a constructed vision of a
picturesque Sri Lanka, a vision filtered through constructions from the colonial
past.
The pre-colonial and colonial landscapes of Sri Lanka
9
The island of Sri Lanka presents a long history of the development of cultural or
human-wrought landscapes. Bawa’s landscapes make reference to this previous
history, particularly the use of water as a device to anchor the building in its
environment. His landscapes (and architecture) also fully acknowledge local
topography in that his gardens and buildings incorporate and integrate with rather
than erase or remove significant features of the local environment such as rocky
outcrops (below the North Cliff at Lunuganga, a stone staircase winds around
and is accommodated to a large boulder outcrop in a way that recalls stairways
through the Boulder Garden at Sigiriya). David Robson writes of Lunuganga,
‘various buildings constructed down the years [such as the Garden Room and
Cinnamon Hill House] appear simply to have grown out of the ground, [and
appear as] carefully restored remnants of some earlier period of occupation’
(Robson 2002, 240). An under-researched aspect of the Sri Lankan pre-colonial
architectural tradition is its ‘use of location and terrain’ (Bandaranayake 2003).
This is evidenced, for example, in the ‘giri’ monasteries of the classic period such
as Mihintale, Varana and Vessagiriya (Bandaranakaye 1974, 55). Bawa’s choice
of the felicitous site of Lunuganga, straddling two low hills on a promontory
projecting into a lake and his careful use of terrain in the construction of the
buildings in that landscape, these structures appearing ‘to have grown out of the
ground’, references vernacular usages and forms.
The place of water in Sri Lanka’s landscapes (either through the incorporation of
a natural feature or the creation of artificial ‘tanks’ or reservoirs) has also been a
10
significant aspect of the natural environment from the island’s earliest histories
and has been briefly referred to in the secondary literature on Bawa. For
example, Sri Lanka’s great historical chronicle, the Mahavamsa, records the
significance of water during the medieval period on a number of occasions,
commencing with the foundation myth of the island (with the arrival of Vijaya by
sea).
There are many examples of the use of water as major features within the Sri
Lankan landscape. These include the extensive gardens of Sigiriya or Simha-giri
(Lion Mountain) in the centre of the island, created by the patricidal King
Kasapya I (477-95 CE) and most probably, given the scale of the works,
continued long after his death. As archaeologist, Senake Bandaranayake, has
noted, there are three principal gardens which lie along the central east-west axis
of the site at Sigiriya (1993, 123-4). These three gardens form a dominant series
of rectangular enclosures of different sizes arranged along an axis and are linked
to other water features, including a fountain garden and a miniature water
garden. The integration of water into the created landscape on the island also
includes the development, by Parakramabahu (1153-86 CE), of numerous
‘tanks’, artificial lakes and the immense hydraulic infrastructure that he caused to
be created in the central dry-zone of the island (Lokuge 2007). Among the many
reservoirs, waterways and lakes that he constructed during his reign, his most
significant legacy is Parakrama Samudra (sea of Parakrama), an immense
artificial lake adjoining his capital, Polonnaruwa.
11
David Robson argues that Lunuganga owes more to English and Italian gardens
than to King Kasapya’s water garden at Sigiriya (2003, 238). On one level this is
arguable in that the landscape of Sigiriya is on a monumental and regal scale.
The water gardens are also symmetrically organised. However, Bawa’s
arrangement of the views at Lunuganga (for example from the North Terrace and
south towards the dagoba) draws in expanses of water into the landscape and in
effect re-structures that relationship of the landscape to the water in a manner
not dissimilar to that at Sigiriya.
In 1810, the last king of Kandy,3 Sri Vikramararajasimha (1798-1815), ordered
the paddy fields to the south of the Royal Palace and the Dalada Maligawa
(Temple of the Tooth Relic) to be converted, for cosmological reasons, into a
great lake surrounded by a continuous ‘cloud wall’ (de Silva 1993, 159). James
Duncan has argued that the Kings of Kandy envisioned the city in the light of
South Asian sacred texts. Kandy was Mount Meru, the centre of the universe,
and the newly-created lake was the Sea of Milk, the name given to the cosmic
ocean at the foot of Mount Meru (Duncan 1989, 187). In his western architectural
training Bawa would also have familiarized himself with foundational texts (of the
architectural profession) and these inflected (although not in a literal manner) his
experiments with the landscape of Lunuganga.
3 Kandy was the last independent state in the island until its capture by the British in 1815. This act brought the whole of Ceylon under a unified control for the first time in its history.
12
Apart from the creation of Kandy Lake, local patronage, and with it the local
tradition of incorporating water into the cultural landscapes of the island, ceased
with the intervention of European colonizers in Sri Lanka. However, during the
early decades of the nineteenth century, the British envisioned the island of Sri
Lanka through western ‘forms of knowledge’, applying a picturesque aesthetic to
the local landscape. They came to the island with a landscape model that they
superimposed upon the pre-existing Sri Lankan one. In some cases they
‘improved’ landscape sites in Sri Lanka’s centres of population at Colombo and
particularly at Kandy. In 1850, Henry Sirr noted of the British Governors’ house at
Kandy that it stood,
‘in the centre of a large lawn, about which are planted at regular intervals
groups of magnolia and palm trees: the park-like grounds cover a large
space, and are well stocked with flowering exotics…The park extends to
the sides of the hills, and beautiful views of the mountain landscape of
Doombera, and the meandering river are obtained’ (Sirr 1850, 93-4).
In the planning of their roads and residences in Ceylon, the British often
incorporated a picturesque view of water and the wider landscape. Perhaps it
would be more accurate to describe this process as drawing a feature of the
distant topography into the immediate, cultivated landscape setting, much as
Bawa was to do at Lunuganga and elsewhere. For example, by orientating a
view, he incorporated the dagoba of Katakuliya temple (a structure situated well
13
away from the garden) into Lunuganga’s landscape. Instead of a Gothic ‘ruin’ as
an eye-catcher, a vernacular and Buddhist structure is encompassed within the
structured landscape of Lunuganga.
In the 1830s, the British governor, Sir William Horton, planned and laid out a road
that wound around the hills behind the Pavilion or governor’s residence at Kandy
(called Lady Horton’s Walk). As a contemporary commentator noted ‘the rapid
succession of magnificent views that meet the eye from this mountain path are
most glorious, as the rapid waters of the Mahavelle ganga flow below, the forest-
clothed mountains….are to be discerned below’ (Sirr 1850, 94). James Duncan
has suggested that the British colonizers envisioned the surroundings and the
topography of the city of Kandy during the nineteenth century as a romanticised,
pre-industrial lakeland landscape (Agnew and Duncan 1989, 192). The British
also applied a nostalgic and romanticised vision to other parts of the island,
including the coastal capital of the colony, Colombo. Writing in 1843, James
Whitchurch Bennett described the prospect of a Europeanized district located
around Colombo (or Beira) Lake in similar terms,
‘the view of Slave Island rising out of the placid bosom of the water, called
the Lake of Colombo, with its pretty houses, bungalows, and other
buildings, interspersed amongst stately areca trees…and…palms, affords
indescribable pleasure to the newly-arrived European (Bennett 1843,
158).’
14
Senake Bandaranayake has argued that Bawa’s use of water, of reflecting pools
and other water retaining structures, used to link the building with its gardens and
wider setting, is an echo of the classic tradition of Anuradhapura, Sigirya and
Polonnaruva (Bandaranayake 2003). His landscapes should be firmly located in
these traditions, particularly structures such as his tourist hotel at Kandalama,
Dambulla with its infinity pool which references the immense watery expanse of
Kandalama tank [reservoir] or the Seema Malika a modern temple (1976) set on
two artificial islands in Beira Lake, at Hunupitiya, Colombo. In addition, it could
also be argued that Bawa absorbed what may be described as a European
landscape model or the aesthetics of a ‘colonial picturesque’ (that is,
modifications wrought to the natural environment of the island by the British
colonizers during the nineteenth century). The landscape model applied by Bawa
at Lunuganga is complex as it defies simple categorization in a single, cultural
and historical origin. Its modernity lies in the re-presentation of different pre-
colonial and colonial models that interrupt a totalizing, unified modern. Bawa’s
landscape, formed of elements of the local and the non-modern, thereby
participates in and constitutes the staging of the modern in contemporary Sri
Lanka.
Bawa had internalized different landscape traditions throughout his career. The
time he spent in Europe furnished him with a knowledge and understanding of
the landscape garden traditions of England and Italy and specific gardens such
15
as Stourhead, Stowe and the Villa Orsini (Taylor 1986, 15; Robson 2002, 238).
The garden at Lunuganga became a site where these European traditions were
re-staged. As such, the landscape of Lunuganga, apparently non-modern and
non-western, participates in and constitutes the modern in Sri Lanka.
A distinctive and local use of water (either natural or artificially arranged) appears
in other works such as his Parliament building at Kotte and many of his hotel
projects, such as at Ahungalla and Kandalama. In creating the lake-land setting
from marshy ground for the new parliamentary complex at Sri Jayawardenepura,
Kotte, Bawa acknowledged local, historical precedent. One architectural
commentator has proposed a more general South Asian source for the
placement of the building in a watery surround and that ‘the grandeur of its
conception is based on a traditional device often used in religious complexes and
popular with the Moguls [sic]: to place the building on an island surrounded by
water’ (Scott 1983, 21). Other buildings by Bawa also draw water into their plan
and thereby engage the sensory experience of the visitor as well as reference
ancient vernacular traditions of building. The first sight of his tourist hotel at
Ahungalla, on the south western coast of the island, is a view across a still pool
filled with coconut palms extending to a further view through the entrance of the
hotel where the sea is glimpsed. As Rupert Scott has written ‘the view across the
expanse of water, lobby floor and again water, whose reflective surfaces are all
identical heights….gives the impression of an unbroken sheet of water’ (Scott
1983, 29). Similarly at Kandalama Hotel, Dambulla the building is first seen from
16
the bund [embankment] of a third century tank or lake with views from the hotel
out to the lake (Taylor 1986, 174). Two pools make connections between the
building, which hugs the contours of the rocky outcrop on which it is built, and the
expanse of water formed by the tank.
Landscape, representation and memory
Writing about the city of Kandy in Sri Lanka, the cultural geographer James
Duncan has distinguished between the terms landscape and environment. He
writes, ‘a landscape…is a culturally produced model of how the environment
should look’ (Duncan 1989, 186). He continues, ‘environments become
transformed into landscapes’ through the application of ‘a particular landscape
model’, which have ‘cultural and historical specificity’. However, he also argues
that landscape models are complex ‘because they escape their original cultural
and historical origins’ the result of which produces ‘heightened ideological
significance’ (Duncan 1989, 186). Lunuganga, it might argued, attains this
‘heightened ideological significance’ not because Bawa consciously sought to
imbue it with political meaning; rather it does so as a result of the experiments he
made in the formation of that garden, the re-presentation of historic landscape
models and negotiation of his relationship to the past through constructions that
originated in colonialism. At Lunuganga, the picturesque landscape model
deployed encompasses the aesthetics of the past both located in European
gardens as well as Sri Lanka’s ancient sites (the latter having been the subject of
many picturesquely ruinous photographic representations by nineteenth century
17
photographers such as Joseph Lawton (Falconer 2003, 154-73)). The
relationship of the architecture at Lunuganga with the landscape and the
arrangement of space might also be categorized as modern in that components
are ‘redeployed’ or re-presented in a ‘modernist manner’ (Taylor 1986, 14).4 For
instance, the creation of the ‘Hen House’ on the Eastern Terrace re-deploys
elements of a vernacular structure in a modern manner. More generally, Bawa’s
garden does not so much present a picturesque image but rather a constructed
vision of the colonial picturesque. In other words, the tropical landscape is
shaped in the manner of western picturesque gardens but Bawa mixes a range
of sources (English, Italian, local) in a way that is modern.
Landscape is best perceived at a distance, hence vision is the main sense
engaged. As one progresses through a landscape, the eye acts as a kind of
movie camera, arranging ‘shots’ or ‘frames’ of unfolding scenes in a filmic
manner. In fact, the visualization of landscape has a long history. As the
photographic theorist Deborah Bright has written, the taxonomic term ‘landscape’
derives from European art history and makes reference to early modern painterly
practice in Italy, Holland and England. In the aristocratic classical tradition of
painting during this era, landscapes were spaces for the representation of noble
action and political allegiance. With the rise of a merchant class in seventeenth
century Holland, a different sort of landscape developed; this appeared more
natural and recorded the ownership of property. English landscape painting of
4 Although Taylor refers to the arrangement of the interiors of Bawa’s buildings with this phrase, it can also usefully be deployed to describe the relationship between the architect’s exteriors and interiors, between landscape and architecture.
18
the eighteenth century followed the Dutch model, but more accurately recorded
the form of the land and reflected the growing prestige of scientific achievements.
Discussing the representation of landscape over time, Deborah Bright has
suggested ‘whether noble, picturesque, sublime or mundane, the landscape
image bears the imprint of its cultural pedigree’ (Bright 1985). Lunuganga
escapes this neat and un-problematic categorization as it is a constructed
version of the picturesque that encompasses the vernacular.
The architectural and landscape theorist, Jan Birksted, has noted how the history
of landscape and gardens has been marginalised from the mainstream of art and
architectural history and visual studies due to lack of engagement with the
theories and conceptual frameworks of these disciplines (2000, 1). It has been
argued that the study of landscape is made more complex due to the need to
distinguish between ‘the representation of sites’ (written accounts and images)
and ‘in situ sites as representations’ and the interaction between these two
modes of representation (Birksted 2000, 2). This article discusses Bawa’s
landscapes as sites of representation – that is, representation of the architect’s
negotiations with early modern European cultural histories, with local, pre-
colonial and colonial histories as well as the modern. Rather than completely
relate to ‘modern Euro-America’ and thereby reify the historical colonial relation,
it is argued that Bawa’s landscapes, through their re-deployment of western and
non-western, interrupt the concept of an over-arching, singular modern.
19
Landscape has also been historically connected with the processes of memory.
The architect and architectural theorist, Juhani Pallasmaa, has suggested ‘we
have an innate capacity for remembering and imagining places. Perception,
memory and imagination are in constant interaction; the domain of presence
fuses into images of memory’ (2005, 67). Jan Birksted has also discussed the
relationship between vision, memory and landscape,
Since vision appears to be natural, it transforms memory into a seemingly
natural experience, an experience present in the here-and-now. The
interaction between vision and memory in the landscape is thus capable of
generating narrative vision that cuts across the…distinction between the
textual and the visual…[in addition] transporting the past into the present,
blurring past and present, recreating the present as the past. Vision of
landscape has a temporal dimension and thus brings the temporal
dimension into the spatial dimension (2000, 3).
Since the 1990s, a growing interest in memory has become evident within the
arts, humanities and social sciences. It has been suggested elsewhere that this
growth owes much to post-modernist criticism of the notion of history that has,
until recently, underpinned Western thought (Kwint 1999, 1). Memory is a
problematic word and has been invoked in recent literature as a term to describe
a number of different concepts: the individual as well as the collective, general
personal experience, the specific act of remembering or the subject of those
20
remembrances. It has also been deployed in connection with nostalgia, tradition,
and history. In this article, the term memory will refer to the process of re-working
or re-translating memory traces in the light of experience during the imagining
and creation of the garden at Lunuganga. It will also address the nostalgic as
well as the modern.
In one sense, the garden at Lunuganga can be understood, paradoxically, as a
re-staging of the picturesque, an aesthetic category developed in Europe in the
eighteenth century but also transferred to South Asia during the colonial period.
Gardens such as Rousham, Stourhead and Stowe incorporated an established
feature of the picturesque, namely the overlaying of particular individual and
historical associations and narratives in the landscape. Lunuganga can usefully
be interpreted as a modern ‘metonymic terrain’ in which architectural and spatial
markers have been arranged over time within cultivated settings (Lewi 2000, 10).
Bawa’s garden renders a picturesque landscape by what has been termed a
technique of picturing, that is, the transformation of found space into
recognisable place. However, what makes the creation of Lunuganga so
interesting is that the technique of picturing and its transformative properties
within the landscape, are more usually found within the dominant schema of
colonial vision and evidence the continuation of this powerful form of envisioning
into the post-colonial era (Lewi 2000, 10).
21
Bawa’s architecture and landscape and the vernacular
Geoffrey Bawa was born into a wealthy middle class family in Ceylon which had
been under British control since the 1796 (Robson 2007, 25-107).5 His father was
a successful Muslim lawyer and his mother was a member of the Burgher
community. The Burghers were a distinct racial grouping within colonial Ceylon,
descendants of Dutch and local marriages (Brohier 1985, 101-19). Bawa’s
mother’s family, the Schraders, were estate owners with land near Negombo and
Aluthgama, close to site of Lunuganga. Bawa gained a place at Cambridge in
1938 and studied for the Bar when he had completed his undergraduate studies,
reluctantly practicing law in London thereafter. During his time in Europe, he
travelled extensively and familiarized himself with the cultural achievements of
the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, particularly the architectural and
landscape garden traditions of Italy and England (Robson 2007, 26, 32).
As David Robson has written, in 1948, with the creation of an independent
Ceylon, Bawa had to decide whether he was a European who happened to have
been born in South Asia or whether he was Ceylonese. He chose to stay and
make his living in Ceylon but not as a lawyer. In the year of independence (1948)
he purchased a disused rubber estate close to his brother Bevis’s house and
garden which was called ‘Brief’ and was located near the village of Kalawila, ten
5 The biographical information on Bawa that follows is taken from David Robson, Beyond Bawa (2007).
22
miles from Bentota in south western coastal region of Sri Lanka (Sutherland
1994). Bevis Bawa’s garden, created between 1929 and 1989, was an inspiring
model for his younger brother Geoffrey and it also acted as a meeting place for a
group of local, European and Australian artists and architects in the 1950s. This
was a period of great excitement within the arts of the island immediately
following independence (Robson 2007, 17). Sutherland describes Brief as an
artist’s garden comprising a ‘series of beautifully composed views and spaces’
(1994). In addition to the massing of a wide range of tropical plants for aesthetic
effect, the creation of woodland walks and vistas, different spaces in the garden
are articulated by figurative sculpture, such as showers, gateposts and fountains
created by the noted Australian artist, Donald Friend, who was an friend of Bevis
Bawa (Hetherington 2004, 8-16).
Realizing that the law was of no interest to him, Geoffrey Bawa increasingly
began to turn his hand in an amateur fashion to the design of gardens and
buildings. He worked for a firm of architects in Colombo and, in 1953, began
training at the Architectural Association, London before returning to Sri Lanka
(Robson 2007, 35-6). As his independent practice grew, he went into partnership
with an ex-patriot Danish architect, Ulrik Plesner who had recently arrived in the
island.
As the architect and writer Ismeth Raheem has suggested, Plesner’s contribution
to the development of modern architecture and practices of design in Sri Lanka
23
during the first years of independence was significant (Raheem 2008). Ulrik
Plesner worked in Sri Lanka between 1958 to 1967, first for the modernist
architect Minette de Silva in Kandy and subsequently with Geoffrey Bawa.
Plesner, however, did not simply impose his ideas on Bawa or his colleagues. He
was deeply affected by the culture and history of Sri Lanka and learned from
historic and vernacular sites on the island. He was also drawn to Buddhism.
Plesner’s family background and his training equipped him in a unique manner to
introduce the principles of design and architecture that developed during the
middle decades of the twentieth century in the Scandinavian countries to the
island of Sri Lanka. His step-father was Kaare Klint, one of the foundational
figures of modern architecture, furniture and lighting in Scandinavia. Plesner also
trained as an architect at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen where he
was taught by some of the most influential architects of the post-war period,
including Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen (Raheem 2008). One of the
contributions to the development of the modern made by the Danish and other
Scandinavian designers and architects was the careful study of vernacular
traditions of design.6 Rather than reject the material culture and built environment
of previous eras, as Bauhaus affiliated architects and figures such as Le
Corbusier had done, Scandinavian architects such as Klint conducted meticulous
studies of the products and buildings of the past and re-presented what they had
learned from these studies as a re-staging of the modern. This intervention in the
production of modernity acknowledged that certain historical types of building
6 This interest in vernacular design in Scandinavia had its origins in the writings and theories of the English Arts and Crafts movement.
24
and object had much to offer in terms of design and functionality. These older
forms also possessed a human quality in that they related to the scale of the
human figure, they were vernacular, that is they emanated from their locality,
rather than being imposed on it and were made of natural, local materials which
engaged all the senses. During his time in Sri Lanka, Plesner disseminated the
principles of this vernacularism through his teaching at the newly formed School
of Architecture at Katubedde, encouraging his pupils and colleagues to record
and study the constructional devices of seventeenth and eighteenth century
architecture in the island in order to find solutions to the problems of
contemporary architectural design (Raheem 2008). Plesner’s influence on
Bawa’s architectural practice and the development of the garden at Lunuganga
was significant. He directed attention to the village-level vernacular of Sri Lanka
that referenced an authentic, local core.7 In a similar manner to the way Le
Corbusier found in the authenticity of the contemporary Indian villager an
essential element of Indian-ness (Brown 2009, 77), so Plesner and Bawa
regarded Sri Lanka’s vernacular traditions as possessing an authenticity that was
both timeless and modern.
The start of Bawa’s architectural career coincided with the end of the ‘so-called
“heroic” period of the modern movement’ around 1960 (Taylor 1986, 9). 8 Bawa
was aware of the new trends in architecture and the fragmenting of the old
Modernist certainties. As Brian Brace Taylor writes, ‘allusions to history, to 7 Plesner was not the first to direct attention to Sri Lanka’s vernacular building traditions. Andrew Boyd, an English planter turned architect, had written about these in 1947 (Boyd 1947, 25-40).8 That is an image of architecture and design fostered by the Congres Internationale d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) with Le Corbusier as its notional head.
25
numerous histories became acceptable again’. There was no sense of post-
colonial resistance to alien forms in Bawa’s output when he began to produce
work as an architect. In fact, he worked initially for a firm of architects (Edwards,
Reid and Begg) that had its roots in the British colonial period on the island
(Robson 2007, 36). Rather than turn his back on European culture and ideas, he
in fact drew on the concepts of the New International style which was emerging
from Modernism. This awareness was also combined with an understanding of
Europe’s previous cultural history and, with Plesner’s guidance, Bawa also re-
appraised the historic vernacular traditions (of building and landscaping) of the
island of Ceylon.
Colonial space, Lunuganga and ‘restructuring’ the modern in South Asia
Writing about colonial space, Edward Said has asserted that western imperialism
was ‘an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the
world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control’ (Said 1990, 77). As
the postcolonial literature critic Shirley Chew has suggested in relation to Said’s
argument, it then follows that the main concern of newly-independent and de-
colonizing nations is the ‘local place whose concrete geographical identity
must….be searched for and somehow restored’ (Chew 2008). One of the key
processes of de-colonization was the re-imagining of landscapes from the point-
of-view of the native person; ‘reclaiming the local place as one remembers it,
something of the past is also repossessed and, with this, a sense of who one is’
(Chew 2008). In the case of Bawa’s landscapes, this process is more complex.
26
His background was moneyed and cosmopolitan. In his early life, he moved
(when finances permitted) relatively easily between Europe and South Asia and
assimilated himself into both regions. He did not so much reclaim a local place
through remembrance as endeavour to re-present the cultural relationship of
some of his generation and class with the west at the moment of post-colonial
rupture. This process of memory involved a revision or ‘retranslation’, as Nicola
King has written, of re-working memory traces (of European and Sri Lankan
material culture, landscape and architecture) ‘in the light of later knowledge and
experience’ (King 2000, 4).
Through Bawa’s landscape at Lunuganga, one can also interrogate the place of
the modern in near-contemporary Sri Lanka. Summarizing the writings of the
Indian art critic, Geeta Kapur, the design historian Saloni Mathur has reminded
us that the ‘modern’ has also had a career outside the physical geography of the
West (Mathur 2002). Kapur does not subscribe to the notion of ‘the modern’ as a
type of linear determinism emanating from Europe outwards. She also rejects the
spatial narratives of modernism, the notions of ‘centre and periphery’ (Mathur
2002). Kapur argues that ‘we should see our [ie South Asian] trajectories
crisscrossing the western mainstream and in their very dis-alignment from it,
making up the ground that restructures the international’ (Kapur 2000, 297). In
the case of Bawa’s landscapes (and also his buildings), local forms are
accommodated and modern idioms have been adapted to local conditions to
27
‘restructure’ or re-present modernity within the history and cultural conditions of
post-colonial Sri Lanka.
Conclusion
What now for Bawa’s garden at Lunuganga? Although a trust has been
established to oversee Bawa’s legacy, David Robson has argued that it would be
best for Lunguganga if it were left to return to nature rather than suffer the
indignities of mass tourism (Robson 2003, 240). In fact a number of up-market
tour companies promote the garden as an exclusive holiday destination.9
Lunuganga has also developed an ‘afterlife’ through its representation in a
number of high quality photographic books, particularly Geoffrey Bawa, Christoph
Bon and Dominic Sansoni’s nostalgic and atmospheric black and white images
(Bawa, Bon and Sansoni, 1990). Citing the works of Fredric Jameson and
Raphael Samuels, the historian Elizabeth Buettner has suggested that in
‘deracinated postmodern circumstances the allure of disappearing worlds,
environments “at risk,” and nostalgia’ for the fragile relics of the past ‘can become
readily enhanced’ (Buettner 2006,14). How Bawa’s landscape at Lunuganga will
be perceived in the future cannot be foreseen; what is more certain is that
perceptions will change, as will the evolving postcolonial conditions that
determine how such ‘artifacts’, created on the cusp of independence and de-
9 For example, in The Guardian travel section in March 2010, the firm ‘Experience Sri Lanka’ offered accommodation at Lunuganga and promised ‘light-filled spaces [that] look onto the lake, rice fields, hills and magnificent garden’.
28
colonization, are interpreted and made sense of, by ex-colonizers and ex-
colonized alike.
Bawa’s negotiation of the ideals of a European picturesque and international
modernism, as well as South Asian vernacular traditions of building and
landscaping have been described elsewhere as the development of a ‘regional
modernism’ (Robson 2007, 258). What has been less acknowledged in these
works is the creation, by Bawa, of ‘sites of memory’ where, although of the
modern era, previous histories are recalled and re-presented to new effect (Nora
1989, 7); these are not un-problematic histories but refractory ones, as they
cannot be erased. Bawa negotiated his relationship to history through
constructions that originated in the colonial past. The making of Lunuganga can
be interpreted as an externalized working out of memory processes or personal
experimentation within the ‘laboratory’ of the landscape. As Pierre Nora has
suggested ‘memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces…and objects’ (Nora
1989, 9). Bawa’s negotiation of the past is complicated as it references ‘modern
Euro-America’ as well as vernacular forms and histories. His landscapes,
particularly Lunuganga, negotiate between slavish adoption of the material
achievements of western modernity, with their taint of colonial subjugation or
provincialism, the wilful neglect or rejection of this troubled past and adoption of
an un-problematic indigenism. Through this negotiation Lunuganga (and Bawa’s
other landscapes) can be interpreted as an intervention in or interruption of a
29
totalizing, singular, unified (and western) modern through the re-presentation or
re-staging of the modern in contemporary Sri Lanka.
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